Plan robot team skills for flexible building assembly tasks
Skill Sequence Planning for Collaborative Multi-Robot Construction
Robotics
Summary
Building with robots can be hard because each task needs special programming. This paper shows a way to plan sequences of robot actions, like grabbing or drilling, so different robots can work together on building projects. The system uses a digital model of the building to decide what to build next and how each robot should help without crashing into each other. People can watch the plan in a digital copy of the job before the robots start working. The approach makes it easier to use robot teams for construction without programming every little step anew.
What this means in practice
- •For construction automation teams: Coordinate diverse robot teams to assemble buildings by reusing preprogrammed actions without detailed task-specific coding.
- •For robotics integrators: Use digital building models and central controllers to generate robot action plans that humans can review before deployment.
Authors
Xi Wang, Bo Fu, Carol C. Menassa, Vineet R. Kamat, Min Deng
Abstract
Robots have significant potential to automate construction processes. However, their industry adoption remains limited, partly because of the programming effort required to adapt robots to diverse tasks. This paper presents a skill sequence planning method that enables a heterogeneous team of multi-functional robots to collaboratively perform construction assembly work using reusable, preprogrammed skills such as grasping, drilling, and fastening. A central controller transforms the digital representation of the building into a construction relationship graph that represents construction entities, their states, and their parent-child relationships. Based on this representation, the system selects the next construction target, generates a symbolic sequence of skills for capable members of the robot team, and produces collision-free geometric motion plans for skill execution. The symbolic planning problem is dynamically regenerated as the construction state changes. An interactive digital twin presents the planned skill sequence and robot states to human co-workers for review and approval before execution. The method is evaluated through a construction assembly case study. By reducing the need to program robots separately for each task variation, the proposed approach supports more flexible deployment of collaborative robot teams in construction.